The State and Revolution was written to prepare the Bolshevik party for their task in 1917 of leading the Russian working class to power. It analyzes the origins of the state, its role in maintaining the rule of capital, the need for the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state, how a workers' state must be used by the working class to defend the socialist revolution, and how the state as an instrument of the rule of one class over another would "wither way" in the transition from socialism to communism, as a result of the gradual dissolution of classes. In this short book, Lenin also takes up the views of the anarchists and the reformists on this question, and exposes their limitations.